In a recent article on Medium, Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor and the head of the Galileo Project, which aims to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life and technology, proposed a provocative idea: what if some of the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) that have been observed by military pilots and astronomers are not alien spacecraft, but rather relics from an earlier civilization on Earth?
Loeb argues that the possibility of a “technosignature” from a long-lost human civilization should not be dismissed without evidence.
He suggests that such a civilization could have existed before the last ice age, when sea levels were much lower and large land masses were exposed.
“Is it possible that the devastating global warming event was caused 252 million years ago by industrial pollution from a technological civilization? This would have required first intelligence to emerge only 6 percent earlier in the 4,540-million-year history of Earth,” Loeb writes.
“Any technological infrastructure left on the surface of Earth from that early civilization could have been demolished by geological activity including subduction, covered by water or tarnished by meteor impacts and weathering.”
He speculates that this civilization could have developed advanced technology, such as aerospace engineering, and launched some of their devices into orbit or interstellar space.
“Within the past century of modern technology, our civilization has launched many thousands of functional devices in orbit around Earth. A more advanced or longer-lived technological civilization could have used more sophisticated devices. Are there unfamiliar technological relics in our sky?
“The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, submitted two recent reports in 2022 and 2023 to the US Congress, admitting the existence of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) whose nature is unclear, some of which exhibiting trans-medium maneuvers between air and water. Could these relics be evidence for a civilization that predated us on Earth 252 million years ago?,” Loeb asks.
Loeb acknowledges that his hypothesis is highly speculative and faces many challenges, such as the lack of archaeological evidence for such a civilization and the difficulty of explaining how their technology could have survived for millions of years in the harsh environment of space.
He also admits that there are other possible explanations for UAPs, such as natural phenomena, human-made artifacts, or indeed alien visitors.
However, he argues that we should not ignore any possibility until we have conclusive data, and that we should use scientific methods and instruments to collect more evidence and test various hypotheses.